GTX 660 Ti SLI vs GTX 680 Single Card Performance Review Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,201 words · ~6 min read
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so this is going to be a quick follow-up video to my GTX 660ti content now you
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can see here I've got two 660 Ti running I've got the MSI 660ti power Edition as
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well as Galaxy's custom cooled GC card
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now for those of you who don't know yes you can mix vendors in SLI yes you can
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mix different clock speeds in SLI different pcbs in SLI I mean this one's
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even running two six pin powers and this one's running a six and an eight
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different coolers in SLI the thing that's important is that the GPU is the
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same so that means you have to have a 660 Ti and a 660 Ti no 660 Ti and a you
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know 670 or anything like that no flexibility on the NVIDIA side unlike
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the AMD side breaker in a 6990 with the 6970 and trifire this doesn't work that
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way so just cuz a 690 has the same GPU
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as not that I think there's a 680 around
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here somewhere but I'm not going to worry too much about it ah there it is right was hiding um as a 680 that
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doesn't mean you can run them in SLI got to be matching gpus also it's been
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suggested to me in the past that mismatched RAM configurations are okay
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but I haven't tried it in a long time and the last time I tried it it didn't
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work so there you go all right so we are
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going to be doing like a value analysis because people ask me about this all the
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time should I buy one powerful card or should I buy two less powerful cards and
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run them in SLI so there are some trade-offs right off the bat two cards
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is going to use more power period it's going to be noisier period because you
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got more fans in this case you got four fans versus one but uh which isn't to
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say necessarily that two of these fans is louder than one of these fans but
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well whatever moving on um so yes power
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noise both worse heat is worse for having multiple cards and in 90% of
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cases multiple cards is bad never run
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two of these instead of one more powerful one that is a low-end card well
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well it's a gaming card but it's a low-end gaming card and you're definitely better off getting something
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in the sort of more bang for the buck $250 to $350 range that's where you
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usually find the best value so we're going to take two 660 Ti versus a single
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680 and find out what delivers the best performance and the best value so here's
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my first graph this is Crisis 2 1080p I'm using all my standard settings so
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this is like ubered out with high reses textures and all that good stuff so you
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can see the 660 Ti configuration actually well destroys the 680 however
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it is more expensive it's about 20% more expensive and when we actually go ahead
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and look at the performance differential it looks like the 660 Ti comes ahead so
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it's about 26% faster and 20% more
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expensive and at minimum FP if you measure minimum FPS it's about 20%
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faster there as well so let's go ahead and you know what I'll do the graphs off
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camera Battlefield 3 again was running at like uber settings 1080P and you can
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see the 660ti again just destroys it in
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terms of average FPS but the minimum FPS
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was a little bit closer so it doesn't look like as compelling a value as as it
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at first appears when you look at the averages however that still does show
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that the 660ti does present a better or SLI does present a better value than a
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single 680 in this particular title as long as you're willing to make those
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trade-offs in terms of power consumption as well as
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noise again running a game at 1080p with ultra high details and again we see at
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that minimum FPS level a 20% improvement
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from the 660 Ti SLI config over the 680
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we see about a 47% Improvement in average FPS but it almost looks like
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NVIDIA knew what they were doing when they were pricing out a single GTX 680
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versus 660 Ti SLI because they're delivering pretty much the performance
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that you'd expect for the Dual uh the
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Dual GPU configuration versus the single one um you know what here I'll just do
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this last one uh on okay no I won't do
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this on camera I need two hands and there's Metro 2033 where we actually see
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about a 30% Improvement in both minimum and average FPS so this is the clear
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winner so what's neat about this cross-section of games is that these are all well they're all Shooters they're
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all demanding uh which or two isn't a shooter actually they're all demanding
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and they all demonstrate that the 660 Ti not only scales consistently in SLI but
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presents a compelling value versus buying a single higher in GPU that is to
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say that's not to say though that it's necessarily the better option because
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two of these is 600 bucks one of these is 500 bucks and for that 20%
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Improvement you are trading off extra heat and extra power consumption so it's
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up to you personally I think SLI cards look more bling bling
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and yeah I think that's probably all else that it's got going for it but uh
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remember guys when you're trying to figure out if a dual GPU configuration
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makes sense you just want to look at performance per dollar that's pretty
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much the only Factor here because they've now got the same features they
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both support 3+ 1 videos out even when you add another card if you're running
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an SLI you can only plug the uh you can only plug in 3 plus one in SLI and this
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one also supports 3+ one off of a single card um you also want to remember that
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things like memory configurations are important so when you're running two
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cards in SLI two 2 gig cards does not
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equal 4 gigs of video memory okay so
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they both have to share the frame buffer which means that you still only get
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effectively two kicks so bear that in mind as well so I know this really
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didn't have a clear-cut conclusion because basically performance per dollar
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they're very very similar it just comes down down to do you want a little bit more performance or do you not want a
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little bit more performance thanks for checking out this episode of L's Tech
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tips and don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and
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